Talk:Edict on Maximum Prices

Untitled

I got the info for this article from:

• The Empire of the Tetrarchs by Simon Corcoran
• Diocletian and the Roman Recovery by Stephen Williams
• A History of the Byzantine State and Society by Warren Treadgold
• A History of the Roman People by Allen Wars, Fritz Heichelheim, and Cedric Yeo

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the names of coins and their values, so I hope it makes some sense in the article (numismatics and economics are definitely not my strengths!). Adam Bishop 22:03, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

URLs removed

I removed two URLs from the References: I didn't think they were very helpful. The first was to a publisher's catalogue entry for the Corcoran book: but since we have the ISBN and other details of the book, anyone can easily track it down if they want to buy it. The second was to a review, on JSTOR (therefore not available to all), of the Tenney Frank book, and the review is not even specially relevant to the chapter that's cited in References.

What would be really useful would be to have a link to a text/translation of the Edict ... Andrew Dalby 16:04, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Consequences

This section includes some absurd claims and is only supported by an authorless abstract, which itself cites no sources to support the referenced claims. It is also premature in the first place to include a section on "consequences" when there is not yet anything in the article to establish whether the edict was actually enforced, or how successfully it was enforced. Until someone more knowledgeable or with access to better sources comes along, I think the whole section should be removed. As is, it's just misinformation. ~2025-44186-05 (talk) 23:28, 3 January 2026 (UTC)

Usually, the advice is to WP:PRESERVE material that's sourced but not great until better stuff comes along, though here I agree that some of the claims were pretty dubious. I've found a couple of better sources and stuck in a short section: it's by no means a full summary of the scholarship (there's quite a debate as to if/how far it succeeded), but a lot of additional bibliography can be found in the cited sources if anyone's interested in polishing it up. For now at least, I think, it's broadly in line with the scholarly consensus -- the edict probably wasn't much enforced, especially in the West, and may have had some effect at limiting prices, but probably not a whole lot. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 12:33, 4 January 2026 (UTC)